Recently – yesterday, 7/15/2014 in fact, an interesting announcement was made regarding the upcoming space simulator Star Citizen. Indeed, the project heralded by Wing Commander Chris Roberts himself has even more news for gamers.

They’ll be adding three authentic alien languages to the game. Three! Nothing makes a world more immersive than having aliens speak in tongues completely…alien…to our own!

Wait, what’s that? Oh, this is going to cost FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS!? Why not $49 million? Oh, that only gets you a virtual space plant. (satire)

That was my first thought. "We have a great thing going and ppl are throwing money at us, so what the hell can we add now?"

But, at least part of me believe in these guys. If u put urself in their shoes, it may be legit.

Imagine actually being given the money to make exactly the game u want to make. U dont want to stop. U wanna make the greatest game ever...and the ppl stand squarely behind u...so...why not add 3 real languages to an already amazing game. Imagine the authenticity. If it gets big...real big...something like this could lend itself to other projects, other media.

"I'm starting to think people that use the word "scam" a lot, don't actually know what it means, IMO".

Well ... to be publicly funded with $48,000,000 and counting , to produce a game that will then be turned around and sold. Are any of the investors going to get their money back? I doubt it, why would they, it's public funding.

So the devs of Star Citizen get their bills paid for by the public funding and then they get to turn around and sell the game and make a profit on this project.

Most other big productions are paid for by the producers , who get their investment back when the game is sold.

I could see how this could look like a scam to some people.

Edit: BTW, I don't agree with the scam theory and I will be getting the game when ever they decide to release it.

How can buying something and then getting that something be a taken as a "scam"?

Thing is, scams involve one party not living up to their part of the bargain.

I buy a game, I get a game: Not a scam.

I buy a game and get a toaster: Scam.

In this case CIG is selling various items and providing those items to the folks who paid money for them. What they purchased and for how much is entirely irrelevant.

Above all, you can, as a free thinking human being, ignore this whole process until the game is done and buy it then.

Not much of a "scam" if you can avoid it so easily.

"Backers" and investors are not the same thing. What is often misunderstood is "backers" are funding the development of a game. Their "return" is the game, not money. And why shouldn't CIG profit off this game?

What this all comes down to is misunderstanding the process, then just blurting out "scam".

Nice bias from the author there. Always nice to see that from inadequate research. That's how it goes I suppose.

There was actually a poll held on the website recently which asked backers if they still wanted stretch goals, because, essentially, they are running out of ideas for them.

It's not a case of them adding weird stretch targets to entice people to pledge, it's actually vice versa with CiG having to come up new goals because the money keeps coming in. CiG can't and won't stop the funding because it all comes from the site shop which provides merch and pre-purchasing of ship packages.

People can moan all the want, but at the end of the day CiG aren't forcing people to get interested and to pledge, and they're as transparent as they possibly could be too about the development process. What more do people want?

Ps. Chris' stance on how stretch goals are presented can be seen towards the end of his letter here:-

Do you know how much money has been invested in this stupid VIDEO GAME. Clearly humans have their priorities messed up when people are dying. Anyways that's not the point of this rant. The point is that now this game has a ridiculous budget and people's expectations are at a level which the game will never deliver to. Everyone will complain and criticize services like Kickstarter when in reality it is their and developers fault for letting hype reach this level and continuing to take the funding and zipping all these lost unfortunate souls.

It's not 50 million just for alien languages. It's a stretch goal for if/when 50 million is achieved. They would likely have to hire one or two new people for the job, depending on what their income would be, probably about $250,000 total or so (both theoretical people combined), could be considerably less. Not sure how much the people needed for said job make on average. Basically, that's not putting much of a dent into the funds considering they keep coming in.

edit: At this point it would be less than 2 million if we were going to look at it in that way, which doesn't make sense. But it won't cost nearly that much to hire a few people in the right field to create said languages.

I think it's justified. They're clearly trying to create a unique universe which will be memorable for standing on its own feet. Also, the stretch goals now are really just a formality to let people continue to fund the game in a moderately exciting way. $50,000,000 is symbolic more than anything else.

I read the title of the article. The title clearly infers that "star citizen wants 50 million for alien languages."

A title should be accurate in summarizing the body of what the author writes. Either the author does not know how to title his work correctly, or he purposefully wrote it in a way to generate clicks to his article to get paid.

I don't believe in supporting these click-bait articles and put ad money in the pockets of immoral "journalist."

People shouldnt have to hit a click bait article to get accurate information that does not match up to attention grabbing titles.

This is the reason i don't click to go in a get the "real" information. Otherwise, i would just be rewarding this person for dishonestly reporting incorrect information to line his wallet and get traffic to his site.

I can't wait too see some more of this game. The concept is cool, I wonder how this title will impact of titles in different genre..

The fact the are focusing on High-End PC only is great. This title could have an Crysis effect. The amount of detail in the ships allow is breath-taking, can't wait too see what else the have for this title in the future...

This guy sounds like a complete tosser. [Why would you want to go for authenticity when you could just play cheap tricks?] he basically asks. [People are blooming idiots who won't know the difference if you just use the same 4 garbled meaningless lines, why go to the trouble of adding depth and meaning to it?] he continues. [2 million dollars is both not enough and too much to spend on this sort of thing] he paradoxically implies.

All in all it comes down to this: [Click my link, I am being contrary for marketing purposes!]